Category Archives: Podcast

Welcome to the Ada Lovelace Day podcast, highlighting the work of women in STEM. Each month, we talk to women from around the STEM world about their careers, as well as talking to women and men, about historic and modern women’s achievements, discoveries, and inventions.

Small note

We’d hoped to get this episode out at the end of last year, but technical and scheduling difficulties got in the way! This episode will be the last for a while, as we are focusing other projects.

In this episode

00:42: Dr Carola Schönlieb talks about how she uses maths to develop new ways to process images.

31:47: We look at the invention of the Laserphaco Probe, a device that uses lasers to remove cataracts, by Dr Patricia Bath.

35:35: Hilary Harper-Abernethy talks about the life and works of astronomer Caroline Herschel.

Our interviewees

Dr Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb

Dr Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb is a Reader in Applied and Computational Analysis, head of the Cambridge Image Analysis (CIA) group at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP), University of Cambridge. She specialises in the mathematics of digital image and video processing using partial differential equations and variational methods. Her team’s research includes the modelling and analysis of these methods, as well as developing their real-world applications.

She has won several prizes, including the London Mathematical Society’s Whitehead Prize in 2016 “for her spectacular contributions to the mathematics of image analysis”, and the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2017. She is the 2018 Mary Cartwright Lecturer of the London Mathematical Society, and has been a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute since 2016.

Hilary Harper-Abernethy

Hilary Harper-Abernethy is a is an amateur astronomer and member of Liverpool Astronomical Society and Society for the History of Astronomy. Her particular passions are the moons of this solar system and the stories of influential astronomers and women in science. She is also a folk singer, and enjoys researching the long oral tradition of English folk music. Professionally she is acknowledged as a passionate advocate of mental health and wellbeing, with more than 30 years’ experience as a public health specialist and nurse. She has a track record of initiating cultural and policy change and a successful history of developing and implementing strategy. This has involved leading needs assessments, designing and commissioning mental health services and leading public mental health and suicide prevention strategy. Hilary is joint author of Social Prescribing for Mental Health – A Guide to Commissioning and Delivery (Department of Health 2009).

The picture shows Harper-Abernethy at the Herschel museum in Bath, England, standing next to one of Caroline Herschel’s dresses.

Hilary was talking about German astronomer Caroline Herschel. Born in 1750, Herschel discovered several comets, was the first woman to be awarded a Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society and to be made an Honorary Member of the Royal Astronomical Society. Here initial astronomical work involved the organising her brother, William Herchel’s, observations but she became a keen astronomer in her own right, discovering new nebulae, comets, and writing the Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars.

Discovery of the month

This month we look at the invention of the Laserphaco Probe, a device that uses lasers to remove cataracts, by Dr Patricia Bath.

Thanks to our sponsor

This podcast is brought to you thanks to the generous support of ARM, our exclusive semiconductor industry sponsor. You can learn more about ARM on their website at ARM.com and you can follow them on Twitter at @ARMHoldings.

Welcome to the Ada Lovelace Day podcast, highlighting the work of women in STEM. Each month, we talk to women from around the STEM world about their careers, as well as talking to women and men, about historic and modern women’s achievements, discoveries, and inventions.

In this episode

01:04: Dawn Childs, talks about her work as Group Engineering Director for Merlin Entertainments Group, and why we need more generalist engineers.

28:43: Guest contributor Melanie Phillips explores the development of the first home security system using CCTV by Marie von Brittan Brown in the 1960s.

Our interviewees

Dawn Childs

Dawn Childs is the Group Engineering Director for Merlin Entertainments Group with responsibility for engineering delivery, standards, practices and processes of the worldwide portfolio of more than 120 theme parks, resorts and attractions. This stretches over 5 continents and encompasses many UK household names such as Alton Towers, Thorpe Park, Chessington, Blackpool Tower and Warwick Castle as well as all of the SEALIFEs, LEGOLANDs, Madame Tussaud’s, Dungeons and Eyes around the World.

Prior to Merlin she was at Gatwick Airport as the Business Transformation Leader, leading a series of transformational airline terminal moves and capital projects and previously as the Head of Engineering, responsible for all of the infrastructure and technical services at the airport. She joined Gatwick in 2012 after 23 years as an Engineering Officer in the RAF.

In June 2015, Dawn was presented with the Alastair Graham Bryce Award by the Institution of Mechanical Engineering for her contribution to the promotion of engineering to children, students, young adults and particularly women. In 2014, she was also one of the Barclays Women of Achievement, and was also made Honorary Doctor of Science by Staffordshire University for services to engineering. She has several other awards.

A keen equestrienne; she was the Chairman of RAF Equitation for many years and competed at the Inter-Services level in Show Jumping and Eventing.

Dr Kat Arney

Dr Kat Arney is a science writer and broadcaster whose work has featured in the New Scientist, Wired, The Guardian, the Times Educational Supplement, BBC Radio 4, the Naked Scientists and more. In 2016, she published her critically-acclaimed first book, Herding Hemingway’s Cats, about how our genes work. According to the journal Nature it’s “A witty, clued-up report from the front lines of genetics”, while Radiolab presenter Robert Krulwich describes it as “a gorgeously written, surprisingly gripping introduction to everything we’ve learned about genes”.

Kat was talking about Professor Dame Amanda Fisher, a cell biologist who produced the first functional clones of HIV, providing the biologically active material essential to studies of gene function in the virus. She then focused on “epigenetics and nuclear reprogramming, particularly in lymphocytes and embryonic stem cells”. Currently, she is working on “how gene expression patterns are inherited as cells divide and how gene expression is changed during mammalian development”.

Discovery of the month

This month, our guest contributor, Melanie Phillips, explores the development of the first home security system using CCTV by Marie von Brittan Brown in the 1960s.

Thanks to our sponsor

This podcast is brought to you thanks to the generous support of ARM, our exclusive semiconductor industry sponsor. You can learn more about ARM on their website at ARM.com and you can follow them on Twitter at @ARMHoldings.

Credits

Episode edited by Andrew Marks. Discovery of the month written and recorded by Melanie Phillips.

Our links

Videos

Welcome to the Ada Lovelace Day podcast, highlighting the work of women in STEM. Each month, we talk to women from around the STEM world about their careers, as well as talking to women and men, about historic and modern women’s achievements, discoveries, and inventions.

In this episode

00:50: Yasmin Ali talks to Suw about life as a chemical engineer.

09:20: Ada Lovelace Day Live! audience members tell us about the women in STEM that they admire.

12:15: Miranda Lowe talks about her work as a curator at the National History Museum.

27:02: Dr Brenna Hassett tells us about the stories our skeletons can reveal, and about some of the groundbreaking women in archaeology.

Our interviewees & performers

Yasmin Ali

Photo: Engineering Showoff

Yasmin is a chartered chemical engineer in the energy industry, with experience in coal and gas-fired power stations, as well as the UK oil and gas sector.

Outside of work Yasmin is a keen volunteer and dedicates much of her time to promoting engineering at schools, career fairs and festivals, with a variety of organisations including the IET, IChemE, and WES. She is also passionate about informing the public about engineering through the media, and has worked with the BBC’s science unit. Yasmin also enjoys stand-up comedy, music and sports!

Miranda Lowe

Miranda Lowe is a museum scientist and Principal Curator at the Natural History Museum, London. She is responsible for many historically important oceanographic specimens, including specimens from the Discovery and Challenger expeditions, and Charles Darwin’s barnacles. Her specialist area of interest is marine invertebrates especially Crustacea and Cnidaria.

As a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology she communicates her science, and has appeared on BBC Radio 4, BBC Four and CBBC. She is passionate about the role that science and museums play in our understanding of the natural world, and her favourite birds are puffins! Miranda was a finalist at the National Diversity Awards in the ‘Positive Role Model Award for Race, Religion & Faith’ category in 2013.

Dr Brenna Hassett

Photo: Rachel Fisher

Brenna Hassett is an archaeologist who specialises in using clues from the human skeleton to understand how people lived and died in the past. Her research focuses on the evidence of health and growth locked into teeth, and she uses clues from both teeth and bones to investigate how children grew (or didn’t) across the world and across time.

She has worked at the Pyramids in Giza, a 10,000 year old village in Anatolia, and a series of basement labs in between, and her book Built on Bones: 15,000 Years of Urban Life and Death is a fast-paced and frequently humorous journey through our recent evolution into a majority-urban species.

Brenna is also one-quarter of the TrowelBlazers project, an outreach, advocacy, and academic effort to celebrate women’s contributions to the trowel-wielding arts.

Thanks to our sponsor

This podcast is brought to you thanks to the generous support of ARM, our exclusive semiconductor industry sponsor. You can learn more about ARM on their website at ARM.com and you can follow them on Twitter at @ARMHoldings.

Welcome to the Ada Lovelace Day podcast, highlighting the work of women in STEM. Each month, we talk to women from around the STEM world about their careers, as well as talking to women and men, about historic and modern women’s achievements, discoveries, and inventions.

In this episode

01:35: Dr Maryanne Mariyaselvam talks about how simple medical inventions can save lives, and how they get from lab to hospital.

25:07: Our Discovery of Month is the invention of the hydrazine resistojet, aka the electrothermal hydrazine thruster, by propulsion engineering Yvonne Brill.

29:22: Dr Dean Burnett discusses why role models are important, and what imposters syndrome is and how to combat it.

Our interviewees

Dr Maryanne Mariyaselvam MBBS

Dr Maryanne Mariyaselvam read her BSc in neuroscience at Leeds University and subsequently completed medical training at the Norwich Medical School, East Anglia. She finished her Foundation Training in the Eastern Region and went onto a research post at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Kings Lynn where she led three regional patient safety projects across 11 hospitals in the East of England.

Maryanne is a fellow on Professor Sir Bruce Keogh’s NHS Innovator Accelerator Programme and two of her safety innovations have been selected onto the programme for national implementation: the Non-injectable Arterial Connector (NIC), designed to prevent wrong route drug administration and the WireSafe, designed to prevent retained foreign objects. Maryanne is also a founding fellow of the Q Initiative and is a fellow on the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme, through which she is developing her 3rd safety innovation.

Dr Dean Burnett

Dean Burnett is a doctor of neuroscience and lecturer/tutor in psychiatry at the Institute of Psychological Medicine and Clinical Neurosciences at Cardiff University. He also blogs for The Guardian, and sometimes performs as a stand-up comedian.

Dean’s first book The Idiot Brain, was published in 2016, and “celebrates blind spots, blackouts, insomnia, and all the other downright laughable things our minds do to us, while also exposing the many mistakes we’ve made in our quest to understand how our brains actually work”. His next book, The Happy Brain, which will be published in May 2018, “investigate[s] what causes happiness, where it comes from, and why we are so desperate to hang onto it”.

Discovery of the month

Our Discovery of the Month is the hydrazine resistojet, which was invented by Yvonne Brill in the late 1960s. It became known as the electrothermal hydrazine thruster and was, eventually, adopted as the satellite and space industry standard.

Thanks to our sponsor

This podcast is brought to you thanks to the generous support of ARM, our exclusive semiconductor industry sponsor. You can learn more about ARM on their website at ARM.com and you can follow them on Twitter at @ARMHoldings.

If you would like to join ARM as a sponsor of the Ada Lovelace Day Podcast, please email us.

Welcome to the Ada Lovelace Day podcast, highlighting the work of women in STEM. Each month, we talk to women from around the STEM world about their careers, as well as talking to women and men, about historic and modern women’s achievements, discoveries, and inventions.

In this episode

01:30: Kristen Salzer-Frost introduces us to the relatively new discipline of fire engineering.

25:05: Our Discovery of the Month is the intriguing story of Liquid Paper, invented by Bette Nesmith Graham.

29:25: Nicole George and Cordon Purcell talk about why neuropsychologist Dr Brenda Milner’s work on memory and cognition has been so influential.

Our interviewees

Kristen Salzer-Frost

Kristen Salzer-Frost is a Lecturer in Fire Engineering at Glasgow Caledonian University who started her career as a Fire Safety Engineer in Australia before moving to the UK. Her specialties include computer modelling of fire and evacuation, practical fire safety building design strategies, international fire engineering projects and fire safety design in historic buildings. She is currently completing her PhD in two-way coupling of fire and evacuation models with the Fire Safety Engineering Group at the University of Greenwich.

Nicole George and Cordon Purcell

Nicole George is currently completing her Master’s of Neuroscience at McGill University, after graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in Kinesiology from the University of Windsor. She is currently studying the pathophysiology of chronic pain. You can follow her on Twitter @nicgeorge5.

Cordon Purcell is a Registered Music Therapist (MTA), who graduated with a Bachelor’s in Music Therapy from the University of Windsor. She is currently completing her Master’s degree in Music Therapy at Concordia University, where her research involves a self-heuristic paradigm, investigating her relationship to music. You can follow her on Twitter @cordonpurcell.

The Superwomen in Science podcast discusses “the past, present and future of women in science, highlighting a wide variety of scientific endeavours as well as issues facing women in science”. You can listen on Soundcloud or iTunes, and can follow them on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Nicole and Cordon were talking about Dr Brenda Milner, whose work with Patient HM over the course of three decades “established that people have multiple memory systems, governing different activities like language or motor skills, opening the way for a greater understanding of how the brain works.”

Discovery of the month

Our Discovery of the Month is something definitely of its time: The invention of Liquid Paper by Bette Nesmith Graham in 1951, and her development of the Liquid Paper Corporation into a multimillion dollar global business.

Thanks to our sponsor

This podcast is brought to you thanks to the generous support of ARM, our exclusive semiconductor industry sponsor. You can learn more about ARM on their website at ARM.com and you can follow them on Twitter at @ARMHoldings.

If you would like to join ARM as a sponsor of the Ada Lovelace Day Podcast, please email us.

ALD 2009's Pledge

"I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same."
— Suw Charman-Anderson

Tuesday 8 October 2019 is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day celebrating the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths.

With thanks to our partners

Ada Lovelace Day is dependent on the generosity of its partners, volunteers and supporters for survival. If you would like to sponsor Ada Lovelace Day, please get in touch. We would like to thank the following organisations for their support of Ada Lovelace Day and women in STEM.